The Internet and other computer networks are communication systems. The sophistication of this communication has improved and the primary modes differentiated over time and technological progress. Each primary mode of online communication varies based on a combination of three basic values: privacy, persistence, and control. Email as a communications medium is private (communications are initially exchanged only between named recipients), persistent (saved in inboxes or mail servers) but lacks control (once you send the message, you can't take it back, or edit it, or limit re-use of it). Instant messaging is private, typically not persistent (although some newer clients allow users to save history, so this mode is changing) and lacks control. Message boards are public (typically all members, and often all Internet users, can access your message) persistent, but lack control (they are typically moderated by a central owner of the board). Chat rooms are public (again, some are membership based) typically not persistent, and lack control.
Blogs and Social Networks are the predominant communications mediums that permit author control. By reducing the cost, technical sophistication, and experience required to create and administer a web site, blogs and other persistent online communication have given an unprecedented amount of editorial control to millions of online authors. This has created a unique new environment for creative expression, commentary, discourse, and criticism without the historical limits of editorial control, cost, technical expertise, or distribution/exposure.
There is significant value in the information contained within this public media. Because the opinions, topics of discussion, brands and celebrities mentioned and relationships evinced are typically unsolicited, the information presented, if well studied, represents an amazing new source of social insight, consumer feedback, opinion measurement, popularity analysis and messaging data. It also represents a fully exposed, granular network of peer and hierarchical relationships rich with authority and influence. The marketing, advertising, and PR value of this information is unprecedented.
This new medium represents a significant challenge for interested parties to comprehensively understand and interact with. As of Q1 2007 estimates for the number of active, unique online CGM sites (forums, blogs, social networks, etc.) range from 50 to 71 million, with growth rates in the hundreds of thousands of new sites per day. Compared to the typical mediums that PR, Advertising and Marketing businesses and divisions interact with (<1000 TV channels, <1000 radio stations, <1000 major news publications, <10-20 major pundits on any given subject, etc.) this represents a nearly 10,000-fold increase in the number of potential targets for interaction.
Businesses and other motivated communicators have come to depend on software that perform Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management, and Enterprise Resource Planning tasks to facilitate accelerated, organized, prioritized, tracked and analyzed interaction with customers and other target groups (e.g., voters, consumers, pundits, opinion leaders, analysts, reporters, and others). These systems have been extended to facilitate IM, E-mail, and telephone interactions. These media have been successfully integrated because of standards (e.g., JABBER, POP3, SMTP, POTS, IMAP, and others) that require that all participant applications conform to a set data format that allows interaction with this data in a predictable way.
Blogs and other CGM generate business value for their owners, both on private sites that use custom or open source software to manage their communications, and for large public hosting entities. Because these sites generate advertising revenue by pulling users into the site, author/owners attempt to protect the content on these sites, so that readers/subscribers/peers have to visit the site, in order to participate in/observe the communication. Thus there is no financial incentive to make the content wholly available to the public and as a result there is no unifying standard for blogs which contains complete data. RSS and Atom feeds allow structured communication of some portion of the communication on sites, but are often incomplete representations of the data available on a given site. Sites also protect their content from being “stolen” by automated systems with an array of CAPTCHAs, (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) email verification, mobile phone text message verification, password authentication, cookie tracking, Uniform Resource Locator (URL) obfuscation, timeouts and Internet Protocol (IP) address tracking.
The result is a massively diverse community that it would be very valuable to understand and interact with, which resists aggregation and unified interaction by way of significant technical diversity, resistance to complete information data standards, and tests that attempt to require one-to-one human interaction with content.